Intel’s 14 nm Cherry Trail-T promises higher burst frequency, faster memory interface and support for more RAM. Will it be a Mullins and Beema killer?

Just before AMD announced the specs on its upcoming mobile APUs for 2014 — Beema and Mullins — VR-Zone obtained a leaked slide outlining some improvements in Intel’s mobile SoC for 2014 over this year’s Bay Trail-T.

First published by VR-Zone Chinese, this slide shows that Cherry Trail-T will have a 300 MHz boost (over the Atom Z3770) in its peak clock frequency, from 2.4 GHz to 2.7 Ghz, and will also support up to 8GB of DDR3 RAM with clock speeds up to 1600MHz.

Support for DDR4 won’t be available until 2015 when Intel releases Willow Trail.

Material on Cherry Trail seen by VR-Zone didn’t address the expected upgrades in the platform’s graphics architecture. With memory bandwidth upgrades and support for double the RAM as Bay Trail, Cherry Trail’s graphics performance will be a force to be reckoned with. More details on Cherry Trail’s graphics architecture, which may share similarities to Broadwell’s, are expected soon.

Cherry Trail will support Display Port 1.2 for video output as well as HDMI 1.4b. It will support up to 4K resolution, but ultimately that will depend on the device manufacturer.

While Intel will have the advantage as far as process node goes in 2014, this doesn’t necessarily translate into more design wins. It will be anyone’s game next year as far was chips-in-hardware goes, with both AMD and Intel having equal shots at this. Bay Trail has plenty of problems which could easily follow it to Cherry Trail, perhaps giving AMD an advantage this time around.